At the end of When Among Crows, the first installment of Veronica Roth’s newest fantasy series, Ala, Dymitr, and Niko survived a trip to Baba Jaga’s infamous house, but now the price of their next mission looms in Roth’s latest installment, To Clutch a Razor. Severed from half his soul and bone sword, Dymitr races against time to be reunited with his other half before losing sanity. Ala’s mind remains haunted by visions of the Knights who tortured her. For Niko, the stryzga and protector of his people, his next mission puts him head to head with the Razor and impending death. The overlapping triangle of each character’s upcoming motivations centers on themes of atonement for the crimes of the Knights, and balancing familial reckoning and betrayal with their own desires.
Veronica Roth dabbles in injecting a bit of magic, edge, and an undercurrent of romance into this series of novels set against the backdrop of Chicago. I had the chance to ask Roth about how she pulled it off over a video call last month.
Like its predecessor, To Clutch a Razor begins with a Polish proverb emblematic of the novel’s theme. Roth said, “I think they’re powerful because we usually have a corresponding one in our language, but the way that they differ is interesting and says something about the people. ‘To clutch a razor’ is a great example of that because the Polish saying translates roughly to ‘a drowning man will clutch at a razor.’ But the English version is, ‘a drowning man will grab at a straw.’ So, it’s more desperate in Polish.” And what use does a razor serve for a drowning man, the rhetorical question verbalized after my own confusion at the proverb. “Grabbing a razor is like he’ll grab anything, even if it makes it worse,” said Roth.
Occam’s Razor, the concept that the simplest answer requiring the fewest amount of follow-up questions is generally correct, bears true for the novel’s three narrators and their intersected revenge missions. As Dymitr asks what he needs to accomplish to regain his sword, Ala to uncover the source of her nightmares, and Niko to defeat The Razor, their silent desires lead the reader to greater insight on the story’s intersection—insights they do not discover until the novel lands in Poland.
A departure from the landscape of Chicago neighborhoods in When Among Crows, To Clutch A Razor splits its settings between the midwestern big city and a trip to Dymitr’s family home—the Knight’s Den:
I knew that I wanted to write this as a contemporary fantasy, and I knew that it would be based on Polish folklore. And I thought Chicago is actually perfect because my grandfather who was Polish was so excited when we were moving here. He’s like, it’s the biggest city of Polish people outside of Warsaw, and this was always a great comfort to him. … So, I think it just made it a really natural fit for it to be set in Chicago.
Roth also pulled from Polish sources to create her world’s mythology:
The splitting of the souls comes from the mythology of the Stryga, which says that there are two souls. So if we take that there are two souls in one body, and we go the exact opposite way, it’ll be like this horrible rending of the soul that the Knights do. So, I wanted to reposition the knights in my own personal folklore as being too willing to give away the things that are important.
I also asked Roth about how she further developed the romance between Dymitr and Niko, which unfurls toward the end of the previous novel in the series:
Yeah, they didn’t have anything going on in the rough draft of this book, but then when they were on the page together, I was like, “Okay, you’re forcing them apart at this point.” But I think I was being too traditional in my approach. I was like, they have only known each other for a day [in the story]. They can’t make out. And then I was like, “What do you mean?” So, I think I loosened up a little bit when I revised.
The novel’s roving close third between Niko, Ala, and Dymitr provides the reader access both to the specificities of their mission, and intersecting interests in each other, from Ala and Dymitr’s growing zmora sibling bond, to Niko and Dymitr’s romance and care for one another. As Roth states, “it makes sense to build this” in terms of romance, and by the novel’s conclusion, the couple is overlooking a body of water as all romantics do.
FICTION
To Clutch a Razor
By Veronica Roth
Tor Books
September 16, 2025
